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- SODP Dispatch - 31 March 2023
SODP Dispatch - 31 March 2023
8 TikTok content strategies for publishers, Substack collects more than $5 million in pledges + more news & tips for digital publishers
Happy Friday!
Let’s talk about story formats.
How important are formats to publishers? It’s about as broad and vague a question as anyone could ask.
Our managing editor, Andrew Kemp, shares his thoughts on the subject in his weekly Editor’s Note column:
I’ve been thinking about the importance of formats on and off for about a decade, ever since my years-long effort to convince my management team that we needed to stop designing our publications in Microsoft Word and switch to Adobe InDesign paid off.
Given our lack of in-house design talent (as hinted at by our dogmatic use of Word), we contracted a designer to both develop the various publication templates and teach us how to use them.
The difference in how the products looked was night and day and gave the editors more freedom to introduce new graphics and images that wouldn’t have been possible before. With that said, I still remember how surprised our designer was at our desire to upgrade our format, noting that publishers in general seemed relatively disinterested in investing in redesigns.
This lined up with my own experience of how long it took management to embrace change. And that’s why it was so interesting to read Anna Sofia Lippolis’ analysis last year of The Verge’s root and stem design facelift.
FROM STATE OF DIGITAL PUBLISHING
INSIGHTS
EXPANDING PUBLIC RADIO CAN HELP SOLVE THE LOCAL NEWS CRISIS
Since 2005, more than 2,500 local newspapers, most of them weeklies, have closed, with more closures on the way.
Responses to the decline have ranged from luring billionaires to buy local dailies to encouraging digital startups. But the number of interested billionaires is limited, and many digital startups have struggled to generate the revenue and audience needed to survive.
The local news crisis is more than a problem of shuttered newsrooms and laid-off journalists. It’s also a democracy crisis. Communities that have lost their newspaper have seen a decline in voting rates, the sense of solidarity among community members, awareness of local affairs and government responsiveness.
Largely overlooked in the effort to save local news are the nation’s local public radio stations.
SOCIAL MEDIA
8 TIKTOK CONTENT STRATEGIES FOR PUBLISHERS
The number of publishers embracing TikTok is on the rise as they attempt to appeal to younger audiences with their nigh insatiable demand for short-form video content.
News publishers in particular are trying to reach younger audiences, who have shown a lack of interest in traditional news channels.
TikTok reaches 40% of 18–24s across all markets, with 15% using the platform for news. While the platform’s role as a news provider trails other social media networks, such as Facebook and YouTube, it has grown its market share in this space rapidly in the past few years.
The opportunity to tap into this growing demand isn’t limited to news providers. Niche and evergreen publishers with the right TikTok content strategies also stand to benefit
TOOLS AND RESOURCES
TOOL
Identify dozens of entities and ontologies using Google's Knowledge Graph data, identify relationships between entities, and get insights into how search engines interpret content, and find hundreds of related entities that can potentially improve the performance of your content. Learn more
TIP
News SEO success factors that publishers should pay attention to in relation to:
BITE-SIZED INDUSTRY NEWS
SEOSeveral weeks ago, Google enabled the ability to export your Google Search Console data in bulk, automatically, to Google's BigQuery. Now, Google announced that you can do this across multiple properties in Google Search Console into a single Google Cloud project. Read more
AIBuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated SEO-driven travel posts by non-editorial staff on March 14; a spokesperson calls the posts an experiment. Read more
SOCIAL MEDIATwitter launches its Verified Organizations program, which allows companies to get a verified checkmark for $1,000/month and their affiliates for $50/month each. Read more
BUSINESS MODELSubstack, a venture-backed subscription media platform popular with writers and known for its email service, has collected more than $5 million in pledges for an extension to its Series B from its community and the internet at large. Read more
SOCIAL MEDIAA new study found heavy Facebook users were far more likely to consume fake news than Twitter or other social media sites. Read more
ADVERTISINGGoogle is launching an ads library, it announced Wednesday morning. The tool, dubbed Google’s Ads Transparency Center, will let users see which ads an advertiser is running, in what regions they’re running, and the dates those ads ran. Read more
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